The road to Utopia is the road to Hell. — Communism and socialism are the opiates of the intelligentsia. — The left, in its eternal and futile quest for "equality", is more than willing to abolish liberty and sunder fraternity.

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Another Thought or Two about Class

My recent post, “Class in America,” offers a straightforward taxonomy of the socioeconomic pecking order in the United States. The post doesn’t address the dynamics of movement between classes, so I want to say something about dynamics. And I want to address the inevitability of class-like distinctions, despite the avowed (but hypocritical) goals of leftists to erase such distinctions.

With respect to dynamics, I begin with these observations from “Class in America”:

Class in America isn’t a simple thing. It has something to do with one’s inheritance, which is not only (or mainly) wealth. It has mainly to do with one’s intelligence (which is largely of genetic origin) and behavior (which also has a genetic component). Class also has a lot to do with what one does with one’s genetic inheritance, however rich or sparse it is. Class still depends a lot on acquired skills, drive, and actual achievements — even dubious ones like opining, acting, and playing games — and the income and wealth generated by them.

Class distinctions depend on the objective facts (whether observable or not) about genetic inheritance and one’s use (or not) thereof. Class distinctions also depend on broadly shared views about the relative prestige of various combinations of wealth, income (which isn’t the same as wealth), power, influence, and achievement. Those broadly shared views shift over time.

For example, my taxonomy includes three “suspect” classes whose denizens are athletes and entertainers. There were relatively few highly paid entertainers and almost no highly paid athletes in the late 1800s, when some members of today’s old-wealth aristocracy (e.g., Rockefeller and Ford) had yet to rise to that pinnacle. Even those few athletes and entertainers, unless they had acquired a patina of “culture,” would have been considered beyond the pale of class distinctions — oddities to be applauded (or not) and rewarded for the exercise of their talents, but not to be emulated by socially striving youngsters.

How the world has changed. Now that sports and entertainment have become much more visible and higher-paying than they were in the Gilded Age, there are far more Americans who accord high status to the practitioners in those fields. This is not only a matter of income, but also a matter of taste. If the American Dream of the late 19th century was dominated by visions of rising to the New-Wealth Aristocracy, the American Dream of the early 21st century gives a place of prominence to visions of becoming the next LaBron James or Lady Gaga.

I should qualify the preceding analysis by noting that it applies mainly to whites of European descent and those blacks who are American-born or more than a generation removed from foreign shores. I believe that the old American Dream still prevails among Americans of Asian descent and blacks who are less than two generations removed from Africa or the Caribbean. The Dream prevails to a lesser extent among Latinos — who have enjoyed great success in baseball — but probably more than it does among the aforementioned whites and blacks. As a result, the next generations of upper classes (aside from the Old-Wealth Aristocracy) will become increasingly Asian and Latino in complexion.

Yes, there are millions of white and black Americans (of non-recent vintage) who still share The Dream, though millions more have abandoned it. Their places will be taken by Americans of Asian descent, Latinos, and African-Americans of recent vintage. (I should add that, in any competition based on intellectual merit, Asians generally have the advantage of above-average-to-high intelligence.)

Which brings me to my brief and unduly dismissive rant about the predominantly white and

growing mob of whiny, left-wing fascists[.] For now, they’re sprinkled among the various classes depicted in the table, even classes at or near the top. In their vision of a “classless” society, they would all be at the top, of course, flogging conservatives, plutocrats, malefactors of great wealth, and straight, white (non-Muslim, non-Hispanic), heterosexual males — other than those of their whiny, fascist ilk.

The whiny left is not only predominantly white but also predominantly college-educated, and therefore probably of above-average intelligence. Though there is a great deal of practiced glibness at work among the left-wingers who dominate the professoriate and punditocracy, the generally high intelligence of the whiny class can’t be denied. But the indisputable fact of its class-ness testifies to an inconvenient truth: It is natural for people to align themselves in classes.

Class distinctions are status distinctions. But they can also connote the solidarity of an in-group that is united by a worldview of some kind. The worldview is usually of a religious character, where “religious” means a cult-like devotion to certain beliefs that are taken on faith. Contemporary leftists signal their solidarity — and class superiority — in several ways:

They proclaim themselves on the side of science, though most of them aren’t scientists and wouldn’t know real science if it bit them in the proverbial hindquarters.

There are certain kinds of “scientific” dangers and catastrophes that attract leftists because they provide a pretext for shaping people’s lives in puritanical ways: catastrophic anthropogenic global warming; extreme environmentalism, which stretches to the regulation of mud puddles; second-hand smoking as a health hazard; the “evident” threat posed by the mere depiction or mention of guns; “overpopulation” (despite two centuries of it); obesity (a result, God forbid, of market forces that result in the greater nourishment of poor people); many claims about the ill effects of alcohol, salt, butter, fats, etc., that have been debunked; any number of regulated risks that people would otherwise treat as IQ tests thrown up by life and opportunities to weed out the gene pool; and on and on.

They are in constant search of victims to free from oppression, whether it is the legal oppression of the Jim Crow South or simply the “oppression” of hurt feelings inflicted on the left itself by those who dare to hold different views. (The left isn’t always wrong about the victims it claims to behold, but it has been right only when its tender sensibilities have been confirmed by something like popular consensus.)

Their victim-olatry holds no place, however, for the white working class, whose degree of “white privilege” is approximately zero. To earn one’s daily bread by sweating seems to be honorable only for those whose skin isn’t white or whose religion isn’t Christian.

They are astute practitioners of moral relativism. The inferior status of women in Islam is evidently of little or no account to them. Many of them were even heard to say, in the wake of 9/11, that “we had it coming,” though they were not among the “we.” And “we had it coming” for what, the audacity of protecting access to a vital resource (oil) that helps to drive an economy whose riches subsidize their juvenile worldview? It didn’t occur to those terrorists manqué that it was Osama bin Laden who had it coming. (And he finally “got” it, but Obama — one of their own beneath his smooth veneer — was too sensitive to the feelings of our Muslim enemies to show the proof that justice was done. This was also done to spite Americans who, rightly, wanted more than a staged photo of Obama and his stooges watching the kill operation unfold.)

To their way of thinking, justice — criminal and “social” — consists of outcomes that favor certain groups. For example, it is prima facie wrong that blacks are disproportionately convicted of criminal offenses, especially violent crimes, because … well, just because. It is right (“socially just”) that blacks and other “protected” groups get jobs, promotions, and university admissions for which they are less-qualified than whites and Asians because slavery happened more than 160 years ago and blacks still haven’t recovered from it. (It is, of course, futile and “racist” to mention that blacks are generally less intelligent than whites and Asians.)

Their economic principles (e.g., “helping” the poor through minimum wage and “living wage” laws, buying local because … whatever, promoting the use of bicycles to reduce traffic congestion, favoring strict zoning laws while bemoaning a lack of “affordable” housing) are anti-scientific but virtuous. With leftists, the appearance of virtuousness always trumps science.

All of this mindless posturing has only two purposes, as far as I can tell. The first is to make leftists feel good about themselves, which is important because most of them are white and therefore beneficiaries of “white privilege.” (They are on a monumental guilt-trip, in other words.) The second, as I have said, is to signal their membership in a special class that is bound by attitudes rather than wealth, income, tastes, and other signals that have deep roots in social evolution.

I now therefore conclude that the harsh, outspoken, virulent, violence-prone left is a new class unto itself, though some of its members may retain the outward appearance of belonging to other classes.

Comments & Correspondence

Comments close 30 days after the publication of a post. If a post is no longer open for comment, or if you prefer to communicate privately, you may e-mail me at the Germanic nickname for Friedrich followed by the last name of the great Austrian economist and Nobel laureate whose first name is Friedrich followed by the 3rd and 4th digits of his birth year followed by the usual typographic symbol followed by the domain and extension for Google’s e-mail service — all run together.

If you submit a comment or suggestion by e-mail, I may acknowledge it or use it on this blog. But I may paraphrase what you say or edit it for the sake of concision, clarity, coherence, or brevity. I will not use your name unless you specifically authorize me to do so. Even then, I will put quotation marks around your name unless I am certain of your identity.

On Liberty and Libertarianism

What is liberty? It is peaceful, willing coexistence and its concomitant: beneficially cooperative behavior.

John Stuart Mill opined that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." But who determines whether an act is harmful or harmless? Acts deemed harmless by an individual are not harmless if they subvert the societal bonds of trust and self-restraint upon which liberty itself depends.

Which is not to say that all social regimes are regimes of liberty. Liberty requires voice -- the freedom to dissent -- and exit -- the freedom to choose one's neighbors and associates. Voice and exit depend, in turn, on the rule of law under a minimal state.

Liberty, because it is a social phenomenon and not an innate condition of humanity, must be won and preserved by an unflinching defense of a polity that fosters liberty through its norms, and the swift and certain administration of justice within that polity. The governments in and of the United States have long since ceased to foster liberty, but most Americans are captives in their own land and have no choice but to strive for the restoration of liberty, or something closer to it.

Who can restore liberty? Certainly not the self-proclaimed libertarians who are fixated on Mill's empty harm principle and align with the left on social norms. Traditional (i.e., Burkean) conservatism fosters the preservation and adherence of beneficial norms (e.g., the last six of the Ten Commandments). Thus, by necessity, the only true libertarianism is found in traditional conservatism. I am a traditional conservative, which makes me a libertarian -- a true one.

Notes about Usage

“State” (with a capital “S”) refers to one of the United States, and “States” refers to two or more of them. “State” and “States,” thus used, are proper nouns because they refer to a unique entity or entities: one or more of the United States, the union of which, under the terms and conditions stated in the Constitution, is the raison d’être for the nation. I reserve the uncapitalized word “state” for a government, or hierarchy of them, which exerts a monopoly of force within its boundaries.

Marriage, in the Western tradition, predates the state and legitimates the union of one man and one woman. As such, it is an institution that is vital to civil society and therefore to the enjoyment of liberty. The recognition of a more-or-less permanent homosexual pairing as a kind of marriage is both ill-advised and illegitimate. Such an arrangement is therefore a “marriage” (in quotation marks) or, more accurately, a homosexual cohabitation contract (HCC).

The words “liberal”, “progressive”, and their variants are usually enclosed in quotation marks (sneer quotes) because they refer to persons and movements whose statist policies are, in fact, destructive of liberty and progress. I sometimes italicize the words, just to reduce visual clutter.

I have reverted to the British style of punctuating in-line quotations, which I followed 40 years ago when I published a weekly newspaper. The British style is to enclose within quotation marks only (a) the punctuation that appears in quoted text or (b) the title of a work (e.g., a blog post) that is usually placed within quotation marks.

I have reverted because of the confusion and unsightliness caused by the American style. It calls for the placement of periods and commas within quotation marks, even if the periods and commas don’t occur in the quoted material or title. Also, if there is a question mark at the end of quoted material, it replaces the comma or period that might otherwise be placed there.

If I had continued to follow American style, I would have ended a sentence in a recent post with this:

What a hodge-podge. There’s no comma between the first two entries, and the sentence ends with an inappropriate question mark. With two titles ending in question marks, there was no way for me to avoid a series in which a comma is lacking. I could have avoided the sentence-ending question mark by recasting the list, but the items are listed chronologically, which is how they should be read.

This not only eliminates the hodge-podge, but is also more logical and accurate. All items are separated by commas, commas aren’t displaced by question marks, and the declarative sentence ends with a period instead of a question mark.